On November 12, 2012 in San Francisco, Calif. Benjamin Jealous, the national president and CEO of the NAACP, is working with his organization to encourage African Americans to support same-sex marriage.

Photo: Rashad Sisemore, The Chronicle

On November 12, 2012 in San Francisco, Calif. Benjamin Jealous, the...

For the past four years, the nation's first African American president has been virtually silent about race.

Whether that will change in President Obama's second term is something known only to Obama, and perhaps members of his inner circle. Others are left to speculate, and two prominent members of the black community have reached different conclusions.

There's likely to be a new and more assertive message from the White House, says Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP and a former Bay Area civil rights activist. Obama, Jealous observes, no longer faces re-election and is mindful of his future legacy and of persistent economic hardships among African Americans.

Don't expect any dramatic shifts, counters Christopher Edley, the law school dean at UC Berkeley and a former White House staff member during two Democratic administrations. The president, he says, is a practical politician, not a movement leader, and knows he would come under fierce attack for highlighting any racial issues.

Obama, to be sure, has invigorated the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, supported race-based affirmative action in court, and opposed Republican-sponsored voter ID laws on the grounds that they would suppress minority voting. His administration has sided with Latinos challenging the Arizona law that allows police to demand documents from those they suspect of being illegal immigrants.

2008 speech praised

But the candidate who gave a much-praised speech addressing the nation's racial divisions in 2008, after opponents tried to tie him to inflammatory statements by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, has said nothing comparable, at least in public, since taking office.

For example, Obama has decried high unemployment without mentioning that joblessness is twice as high among African Americans.

And he seems to have gone out of his way to avoid a repetition of the controversy that flared after he criticized the arrest of black Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates outside Gates' home in 2009, then hastily invited Gates and the arresting officer to a White House courtyard for what became derisively known as the Beer Summit.

The 2012 campaign included some veiled racial references from Obama's opponents - "birthers" questioning whether he was a natural-born citizen, Newt Gingrich deriding the "food stamp president" with a "Kenyan anticolonial" mind-set, Mitt Romney blaming the boos he received at an NAACP convention on Obama supporters who want "free stuff," and Romney surrogate John Sununu berating the "lazy" president who needs to "learn how to be an American."

Obama's counterattacks were modest, and they steered clear of race. His first-term attitude may have been summed up, in a different context, by Shirley Sherrod, the regional Agriculture Department official who was dismissed by the Obama administration in 2009 after blogger Andrew Breitbart doctored a video to make her look like an antiwhite racist.

New tone expected

The president wasn't directly involved in her removal but set a tone that brought it about, Sherrod wrote in a recently published memoir. "There was zero tolerance for anything that would bring race to the forefront," she said.

In Obama's second term, Jealous, the NAACP president, is forecasting a different tone and some new initiatives.

Four years ago, Jealous said in an interview, Obama made a "persuasive argument" that all segments of the population were suffering economically, and "it would benefit all to focus on a strategy that lifts all boats."

Now, he said, "other boats have risen more quickly than ours," and the president realizes that the nation "cannot afford to leave entire communities behind."

Jealous predicted a major presidential address on civil rights this year, the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

Disavowing any inside knowledge of Obama's plans, Jealous said he expects the president to tell the nation "what he intends to do to finish the unfinished work of Dr. King ... for the black community and communities of color."

Opposing view offered

A different forecast came from Edley, the UC Berkeley law dean who served in the Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton administrations and was an adviser in Obama's 2008 campaign. He said Jealous, whom he described as a "dear friend," was doing some wishful thinking.

"Obama teaches the nation about race just by being before our eyes and on our minds every day," Edley said. But in the "cold politics of race," he said, any attempt from the liberal side to add a racial perspective to national debates is likely to backfire - in particular, if it comes from a nonwhite president.

"He can't make his presidency about race" or improve chances of passing health care or job-creation initiatives by focusing on their importance for minority communities, Edley said.

Besides, he said, Obama has declared repeatedly that social change starts at the bottom, not the top. "I don't expect a pragmatist like Obama to change his leadership style to that of moral crusader," Edley said.